First, the Orlando shooting massacre happened. Then we had some issues with an Oi! Spaceman recording. Then some personal issues kept us away from the microphones for a few days. Long story short, I don't have a lot of new content for you this week. The only new episode anywhere in the Oi! Spaceman family was this intermission episode I did by myself over on They Must Be Destroyed on Sight, discussing three of the Westerns that James and Kevin have chatted about in their last two episodes, all of which I'd seen for the first time: The Hanging Tree, My Darling Clementine, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.

The Western genre is very much about the limnal space between the ideals of "civilization," (as problemmatic as the term can be in any context) and those of "open range." Namely: how do we as a society deal with bad actors in our midst, with violence committed by those in our communities. Should we respond to violence with more violence, or are there other (more "civilized") ways of responding? These ideas were very much on my mind when I recorded the episode, as I recorded ...

Those of you who aren't already listening to Oi! Spaceman, despite Jack's constant prodding, may not know that while we started out as a weekly Doctor Who podcast, we've recently gone dynamic, with various threads representing different podcasts pitched at different audiences. Did I just outright steal the idea from Pex Lives? Maybe....

Anyway, Phil has asked me to take the Saturday spot and promote the stuff we've produced in a given week. These will vary a bit as we're not on a specific schedule, but we produce at least two podcasts of roughly ninety minutes each week, and often more than that, so you should have plenty of time-wasting audio in your life going forward.

Over on Oi! Spaceman proper, or The Mothership as I sometimes think of it from the old Law & Order Usenet groups I frequented in years past, Shana and I discussedHorror of Fang Rock with recent Pex Lives guest Kit Gonzo, and as you can tell from the podcast title, things got pretty violent pretty fast. The prospect of Richard Dawkins being brutally murdered by Leela and the connection between Skinsale and Bill O'Reilly are ...

(Content Note: This post contains discussions of the psychology of dominant/submissive relationships and their representation onscreen, but is not itself in any way sexually explicit.)

Those of us who either identify as a Gender/Sexual Minority (GSM), or just participate in what might be euphemistically called alternative lifestyle communities, (or some combination of the above) often find ourselves panning through a great deal of heteronormative/amatonormative, relationship-escalator, milquetoast/middle-class/Establishment Julia Roberts silt in order to find those tiny nuggets of gold that we actually feel represents us in mainstream media. Tiny moments, often unnoticed by the mainstream, become hugely portentious when viewed through the proper set of eyes. Consider Samwise touching Frodo's hand in Rivendell, or the endless puerile humor of Batman and Robin, or the incredibly passionate fandom that's arisen around Five/Turlough shipping (or Tegan/Nyssa, or... well, can we just say the whole of Doctor Who from 1981-1984 is just one big pile of queer shippery and get it over with?)

As a culture we're very used to discussing gay subtext in media (who still remembers The Ambiguously Gay Duo?), and increasingly that comfort is being extended to lesbian and bisexual subtext, but outside ...